Six Southern California Army veterans are among Medal of Honor recipients

Charles Baldonado, a retired Army officer is the younger brother of Army Corporal Joseph Baldonado, who was killed in Korea. Joseph Baldonado’s Distinguished Service Cross is being upgraded to the Congressional Medal of Honor in a White House ceremony on March 18. Charles will accept the Congressional Medal of Honor on behalf of his brother at the White House.
LaFonzo Carter — Staff Photographer

To his fellow soldiers in the 1st Cavalry Division, Jesus S. Duran was known for his big smile and funny pranks that kept spirits high.

The Juarez-born infantryman “loved life, and he loved to have fun,” said George Boothe, his sergeant during 1968 and 1969 in Vietnam, along the border with Cambodia and Laos.

When bullets began flying, Duran, an M-60 machine-gunner, could be counted on to give his all, Boothe said.

On Tuesday, Duran’s name will be among the 24 Army veterans to be awarded the Medal of Honor by President Barack Obama in the second-largest mass presentation of the nation’s highest award for combat bravery.

Called the Valor 24, this new group of Medal of Honor recipients includes 17 soldiers of Hispanic origin, with six of them having ties to Southern California.

In 2002, pressured by various veterans and civic groups, Congress ordered what became a 12-year review of the files of 6,505 Hispanic and Jewish veterans who received the nation’s second highest combat medal, the Distinguished Service Cross, but may have been passed over for the Medal of Honor due to ethnic bias.

A Pentagon spokesman declined to speak about past practices regarding the review of the Hispanic and Jewish DSC recipients.

“This action is not unprecedented,” said Navy Lt. Comdr. Nathan Christensen, a Pentagon spokesman, of the action to honor the 24 veterans.

In decades past, Congress has ordered similar reviews for Asian- and African-American armed services members.

The most recent review encompassed veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

Belated honors

“This has been a long time coming,” said Richard Valdez, a veteran of Vietnam.

Valdez is commander of the Disabled American Veterans Association in California and its local chapter in San Bernardino.

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“These were well-deserved awards that were held up simply because of biases and objectives on the part of those writing the recommendations or those who were providing information for those recommendations,” Valdez said.

Vietnam War hero Duran never expressed dissatisfaction with the Distinguished Service Cross, said his widow, Alma Brigandi of Riverside.

“He wanted to do his job and come home,” Brigandi said of her husband’s military service.

After returning to civilian life, Duran mentored many young people in the neighborhood and worked for correctional agencies in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

He was fatally stabbed during an altercation at a Riverside bar in 1977, family members said.

Duran’s son, Chuy Duran, read the official account of his father’s heroism and said he can see why his father is among those being recognized.

When Jesus Duran received the Distinguished Service Cross, it was the highest honor bestowed to those in the small yet heavily decorated reconnaissance platoon, Ohio resident Mike “Mic’ DeHart said in a telephone interview earlier this month.

A sergeant in Echo Company with Duran, DeHart was among those pinned down inside a large bomb crater, when Duran on April 10, 1969, stood exposed on the crater’s summit and with his M-60 turned back a large attacking force of North Vietnamese regulars.

“He bought us a way out,” DeHart said.

Duran was recognized for his bravery at the time, DeHart said.

Gen. Creighton Abrams Jr. helicoptered to a remote landing zone where Echo Company lived when it wasn’t beating the bush for North Vietnamese soldiers.

He presented medals to Duran and others, including DeHart, who received the first of his two Silver Stars, the Army’s third-highest combat honor.

DeHart said the general’s appearance wouldn’t have happened for a Silver Star presentation alone.

“The DSC (Distinguished Service Cross) was a big deal,” he said. “The brass likes to get involved in something like that.”

Abrams, who at that time commanded the war effort in Vietnam, asked Duran how many days he had left on his one-year tour of duty. The answer was 41, DeHart recalled.

Above and beyond

“He was still fighting for everyone even though he was wounded,” she said. “He deserves this medal. He was a really brave man.”

The Laras came to Riverside from Mexico and settled into its Casa Blanca community.

Lara now becomes the second Medal of Honor recipient from this small community, she said.

On May 27, 1944, Lara led a squad near Aprilia, Italy, that “aggressively neutralized one enemy strongpoint after another.”

With three other soldiers, Lara forced the surrender of 15 German soldiers and forced two enemy mortar crews to abandon their weapons.

The next day, Lara received a severe leg wound for which he declined to accept first aid.

He borrowed a Browning automatic rifle to knock out German machine-gun nests that had been inflicting heavy casualties, according to the Army’s Valor 24 website.

Despite his injuries, he kept advancing on one enemy machine gun crew after another, killing German soldiers with withering rifle bursts or causing them to flee.

Hernandez said that when her father — who has difficulty hearing — told her he had spoken with President Barack Obama, she told him, “You must not have heard right.” Her next thought was, “You didn’t give him your credit card number did you?”

After several calls to Washington numbers, Hernandez said she was convinced her father heard what he said he did.

“Everyone is excited that this is happening,” she said last week.

Earlier in the day, Hernandez said, she received a call from her uncle’s old unit, which is now based in Oklahoma.

“They said a general would be calling us,” she said.

Alfonso Lara, who was 12 years younger than his brother, the war hero, wants to bring his brother’s remains back to be with the five Medal of Honor recipients at the Riverside National Cemetery.

Although Lara survived the battle that has now resulted in the Medal of Honor, he died a little more than a year later.

The family does not know how he died, although they were told it was not during combat.

He is buried at the Lorraine American Cemetery and Memorial in Lorraine, France.

“It is a beautiful spot,” Hernandez said. If the family is unable to bring him home, she said his resting place in France would be OK.

Apple Valley resident Charles Baldonado, the younger brother of Korean War hero Joe Baldonado, of East Los Angeles, said he heard from someone who knew his brother in the Army that he had been recommended for the Medal of Honor, but he received the Distinguished Service Cross instead.

“I wondered from time to time why he had been downgraded,” Baldonado said. “I guess somebody heard me.”

Like the Laras, Baldonado wants the body of his brother brought home, but unlike the Laras, he does not know where his brother is buried.

Baldonado hopes the attention on his brother’s wartime experience will open new doors to the possibility of bringing his body back to the United States, although he’s not sure where the body resides. It could be in North Korea, a country not likely to provide access, or it could be at a military cemetery in Hawaii, he said.

The older Baldonado was killed by a grenade in the Korean War, but not before he used his machine-gun to cut down “wave after wave” of enemy troops.

Joseph Baldonado was born in Denver, but the family soon moved to East Los Angeles and later to Gilroy.

After a fire destroyed the Baldonado home in Gilroy, few photographs and no Army papers survived, said Charles Baldonado, 77.

“All that’s left are memories and those are fading as time goes on,” he said.

A different era

This week’s ceremony for the Valor 24 group, “is vindication for all of our soldiers, no matter what their background,” said Brent A. Wilkes, executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens.

“The armed forces are becoming a color-blind institution,” he said, noting however that there “are still some issues (with diversity) among the top-general ranks,”

Luis Vazquez-Contes, national director of the GI Forum, which has its decades-old roots in the battle for equality for Hispanic veterans, said discrimination in the armed services was significantly different in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, and he encountered some of it during the late 1960s in Vietnam.

“We were a major force in getting this review” of Hispanics that might have been passed over for the Medal of Honor, Vazquez-Contes said.

“Hispanics have a long history of military service and bravery,” he added.

Wilkes said that over the years, the military has been ahead of most of the country regarding integration and equality.

Years ago, returning vets, accustomed to the military’s less discriminatory environment than back home, returned from the service with leadership skills and began advocating for equal rights, he said.